Monday, October 31, 2016

Beards have
ultimately won not one but two series against New Zealand this year. While the
bearded team won all the five test matches, the one-day series was won by three
matches to two. The last One Day International (ODI) at Visakahpatnam must have been very disappointing
for the New Zealanders. They lost it by as many as 190 runs, a stunning defeat
– all because of too many bearded men in the field?.

One was left
wondering whether this superlative performance was because of the sudden growth
of fizz all around in the Indian camp. New Zealand are actually not quite the
push-over in so far as the game of cricket is concerned as they would seem to
be from the results. To beat them so thoroughly, particularly in the five five-day
test matches needed, one thought, much more than cricketing acumen. One wonders
whether it was the new facial that the Indian brigade landed on the grounds
with that did the trick. Never in the history of cricket in India had so many
bearded men taken to the field to play the gentleman’s game. This time almost
everyone barring one or two sported lush and well-cultivated black beards and
luxuriant mustachios.

Out of the
19 named for the tests with New Zealand as many as thirteen sported beards –
some shaggy and others really lush. There were some unlikely team members who
also took to growing good, healthy looking beards. Bhuvaneshwar Kumar, for one, was never the one who could be expected to raise that healthy growth. But he
did and sported a good lush beard – probably inspired by the skipper Virat
Kohli. Even Ravi Chandran Ashwin, that unlikely Tamilian, displayed the
unexpected fungus along with Umesh Yadav who, not to be left behind, fell in
line with the team spirit and could manage a kind of stubble, somewhat like a
wild and widely-spaced under-nourished, draught-stricken growth. Murli Vijay,
Cheteshwar Pujara, Rohit Sharma and Ajinkya Rahane, however, took the cake away being
virtually unrecognizable in their thick well-groomed fizz that seemed to have
been fertilized with heavy doses of urea and potash.

As an aside,
one must mention the legendary Dr. WG Grace who used to display a massive
flowing beard. A cricketing legend in more ways than one he excelled in
batting, bowling and fielding. One wonders whether those superlative qualities
were born out of the best beard ever witnessed on the cricket pitch. A 19th
Century cricketer he used to represent England along with his two other
clean-shaven rather undistinguished brothers.

Among the fresh
faces for the final two ODIs Dhawal Kulakarni and Hardik Pandya also displayed
facial hair. While Dhawal’s was sumptuous and made him look more like his
fellow Mumbaikar, Ajinkya Rahane, Hardik’s was no match. No wonder he was
dispensed with in the final ODI having been rather undisciplined in his bowling
in the fourth ODI. One wonders if it was because of lack of care in raising a
good-looking growth that matched the heft and carry of a speedster.

A bearded
team seems to have been a kind of a totka
for Indians. Unfortunately, I could not get the English equivalent of the
word. The online dictionaries have been of no help, frankly confessing that it
is not yet on their database. In Hindi totka
is associated with superstition. It suggests that if you did a certain
thing in a certain manner you were more likely to do well. Many cricketers,
including the God of Cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, believed in it. It could mean putting on the left leg-guard
before the right one or vice versa. It all depended on the player to determine
which act of his before commencement of a match actually resulted in better performance. Perhaps, landing on the cricketing
middle with beards, too, is a “totka” pushed
by the skipper, MS Dhoni and his deputy, Virat Kohli, both of whom have lately
given up their hairless visages.

If beards
could win cricket matches, why have it against the players. It does seem to do wonders to them. Let’s all revel in beards and clap the team on to
more and more successful exploits on the cricket pitch at home or abroad.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Nobody seems to be overly rattled by
the threat of the Upper Lake disappearing in the next twenty years unless
proper care is not taken of it and its catchments. That the Lake was under this
kind of a threat was mentioned by Saswat Bandyopadhyay, Professor in the
faculty of Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), a reputed
training and research institution based at Ahmedabad during an interview with a
local vernacular daily. He was here in connection with a seminar on Smart and
Resilient Cities Integrating Approaches. He has a number of years of experience
in the field of urban infrastructure and environmental management.

Apparently, because of his close
association with the preparation of the master plan for development and
conservation of the Upper Lake on behalf of the CEPT that was given the
consultancy for the purpose by the state government he was asked questions
relating to future of the Lake. It may be recalled that the CEPT prepared the
Master Plan after a detailed study of the Lake and its catchment areas and
submitted the same to the MP Government in 2013. The report is stated to be
under examination since then. One wonders how many years a government with its
huge paraphernalia should take to examine the report and a plan submitted by
the consultants whom it had appointed - what is under submission is, after all,
not rocket science that is beyond the comprehension of the government. It must
be something more than what meets the eye – something that smells very, very
fishy.

Bandyopadhyay’s interview revealed
something dark and sinister about the Lake. He said that if steps were not
taken in accordance with the Plan submitted by CEPT the Lake could disappear in
the next twenty years. In this connection, one recalls that three researchers
from three different universities had studied the Lake in detail a few years
ago and had opined that unless conservational efforts were made the Lake could
disappear in around eighty years. Obviously, during the intervening period, the
time available to restore the Lake has appreciably shrunk and it has now come
down to only twenty years. Quite clearly it is terminally sick and given the
government’s couldn’t-care-less attitude it could die within the lifetime of
numerous of those who drink its waters (of course, after treating it) and haunt
the Boat Club on its shores for entertainment and recreation.

While the Mayor, who is the chairman
of the Empowered Committee for conservation of the water body, got rattled –
but only for a short while – there has been no reaction from the state
government. In so far as the state government and its concerned departments are
concerned the words of Saswat Bandyopadyay seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
There seems to be an ill feeling in the government against the CEPT represented
by Bandyopadhya for the simple reason that his report refused to say what the
government wanted to hear. Hence the report has been suppressed and is likely
to be killed by sheer inaction. The government wouldn’t mind its money going
down the drain if the political objectives are not met.

Because of the unconscionable delay the
Citizens’ Forum had appealed to the National Green Tribunal to issue directives
to the government to make the report public. Though it has been shown to the
NGT, and that was more than six months ago, yet it has not been made public. Clearly,
the government does not like the report; if that is the case nothing prevents
it from rejecting the report. But no, it has taken to the typical bureaucratic
way of allowing it to gather dust and rot.

While Mayor has called a meeting of
the Empowered Committee reportedly after 27 months the report seems to have
provoked a reaction from the government’s Environment Planning and Coordination
Organisation (EPCO). A so-far-unknown Wetland Conservation Authority
functioning under the EPCO seems to have woken up and has called a meeting of
all government stakeholders of the Upper Lake. One wonders where this Wetland
Authority was all these years and why it was kept hidden from public view by
the powers that be and what exactly it has done to prevent degradation of the
Lake. Anyway, its meetings may hardly yield anything positive as it is the
political head of the state that has to take a decision in respect of the CEPT
report.

Saswat also seems to have said that the
(ill) effects of inaction on the CEPT report will be visible in around five
years’ time. Besides, the unrestricted construction and encroachments in the
catchments of the Lake will also reveal their impact around the same time. That
construction is going unabated is apparent as I can see new clusters of light
across the shores little away from Bishenkhedi. According to Saswat, natural flow of water
into the Lake is being hampered and, obviously, unless this is checked its Full
Tank Level (FTL) is going to shrink as also its catchment area. He also
mentioned that since the Lake straddles the districts of Bhopal & Sehore it
is difficult to coordinate action for its conservation. The people of Sehore do
not drink its waters and, hence, they merrily carry on with their chemical
farming.

The newspaper pointed out in brief
some of the issues that are there in the CEPT report. From it, it seems, what
got the goat of the government was perhaps the recommendation to ban
construction and housing projects inter alia in Bhauri and Phanda where heavy
constructions have already taken place. Bhauri was developed as an
institutional area against the advice of Late Mahesh Buch who was against implementation
of projects there as the place had no water. True enough, sometime back there
was a proposal to supply water to Bhauri from the Upper Lake. In Phanda Aakriti
builders were handed over a huge area of land where low rise housing is coming
up. Similar allotment of lands was made to others too for housing projects
knowing full well that the area fell in the catchment area.

The business of allotment of land and
construction on them provide attractive spin offs for the greedy politicians,
bureaucrats and sundry minions. And hence the CEPT report is just not acceptable,
especially when the next election is round the corner. In making such an
allotment some years ago to Chirayu Hospital and Medical College near Phanda
the politicians, bureaucrats and municipal officials revealed their greed and
exposed themselves to ridicule. The frontage of the hospital gets flooded even
if the town gets below-average rainfall. It is situated plumb in the catchments
of the Lake.

Hence, the Upper Lake’s is a gone
case. Its sources Kolhans and Uljhawan rivers will be exterminated starving it
of water and eventually leading it to its death. The local government with its greedy
politicians and bureaucrats in active collaboration with the real estate lobby
will see to it that the Lake succumbs to the multi-pronged assaults made on it.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Ram Chandra
Guha, a free-thinker, author and a historian who has authored numerous books on
Indian History and random societal matters, recently enumerated eight reasons
why Indians cannot speak freely. He says India is a 50-50 democracy. It is
democratic only in a few respects and it is not so in many other respects. He
says the country is free in respect of conduct of free and fair elections and
movement within the country. It is, however, only partly democratic in other
ways. “The democratic deficit” that largely occurs is in the area of freedom of
expression.

According to
him, there are eight ways freedom of expression is being threatened. Analysing
the whole gamut of connected issues, Guha cites retention of archaic British-era
laws, a faulty judicial system where the lower courts, particularly, are too
eager to entertain petitions seeking ban on individual films, books and a
variety of works of art, the rise of identity politics, especially of the
regional kind, behavior of the police force which generally sides with the
“goondas”, pusillanimity of the ruling class in decision making, particularly
when votes are at stake and dependence of the media on the government for
advertisements as some of the ways in which freedom of expression has been
brought under threat, even curtailed.

Guha’s
analysis is unexceptionable. I have purposely not dilated on all the ways that
he thinks freedom of expression is being denied in the following paragraphs only
to keep this discourse short. I, however, wish to write about the last one as
it has hit me, and I am sure many others, at a personal level. I find myself in
tune with the last one as I have experienced the denial of my right of expressing
my views on local and other wider issues.

I am a casual writer and took to writing after
retirement from the Government of India. To start with, the lack of civic
amenities in Bhopal provoked me to write letters to the editor of the Central
Chronicle, then the only English language newspaper in Bhopal with substantial
local content but with limited circulation. In those early days I had no
computer and I used to bang away on my portable typewriter the deficiencies in
performance of the civic body. Twenty years ago the public bodies and other
utilities were far more inept than they are today and there was much to write
about. Most of the times the letters would not have any effect but some would
go home and yield some results. That itself gave a great deal of satisfaction.

The postal system was reasonably good in those
days and my letters to the Central Chronicle on local issues would get
published within two or three days. The ones that I used to send on wider
issues to The Statesman in Calcutta would take five or six days to be published
if the newspaper’s editor, the venerable Mr. CR Irani, happened to put his seal
of approval on it. I was gratified to see that some of my letters would
occasionally lead the letters column on the Centre Page of the Statesman. That
was a huge matter for me, and I would indulge in some slapping of my own back.
The electronic media had till then not made the kind of inroads in the area of
journalism as it has done now. The Statesman was then in a healthy state and
used to be published from New Delhi and Calcutta and its Centre Page
occasionally used to carry letters of readers in two whole columns

Soon the
Hindustan Times came to town. And, perhaps, simultaneously, I acquired a
desktop that made writing far easier. The newspaper had a four page city
supplement which used to cover political, social news as also news from the
world of fine arts and sports. Its editor, Askari Zaidi was a fantastic journalist
who had a different kind of take on journalism. He once happened to tell me that he thought
that the newspaper and the city would gain and become richer if the local
thinking people were given a platform. And he did that and, as far as I am
concerned, there was never an occasion when my piece did not find the light of
day in the Supplement.

He, therefore, published articles from Late
Mahesh Buch, Kripal Dhillon, former DG Police who was hugely concerned about
the deteriorating quality of life in the city, Prof. Zamiruddin Ahmed who has a
flair for writing in English as well as Urdu, RJ Khurana, retired chief of
Joint Intelligence Committee of Government of India and so on. I too joined
them and my first article entitled “The Dying Lake”, a hard copy of which I
left at Zaidi’s office, was promptly published. I had written the piece as
somehow the Lake appeared to me to be degrading and decaying. Mr. Zaidi
published it with photographs and all. It was an out and out criticism of the
way the Upper Lake, a great asset of the city, was being managed.

My honeymoon
with the Hindustan Times continued for more than five years till, sadly, Mr.
Zaidi had to leave. Since then the editorial policy changed and the newspaper
would not publish unsolicited articles. Even the Times of India, which later
started publishing from the town, adopted the same policy. At that time it was
not clear whether this posture of the newspapers was adopted of their own
accord or the management received directions from the local government. Now,
however, it seems the print media is under threat of losing government
advertisements were it ever to publish comments and opinion pieces that happen
to be against the government.

So we, all of us who happen to have opinions
of our own and can ventilate them in our writings were effectively gagged. For
some time I was terribly annoyed and peeved but could do nothing about it. People
who used to read my columns would ask why I discontinued writing. I could only
shrug my shoulders and say that my lips were effectively sealed. Sadly, the
healthy Bhopal supplement that Hindustan Times used to bring out was scrapped
and in its place what they came out with was nothing better than a rag. The
same goes for the supplement of the Times of India which goes by the name of
Bhopal Live – having more of Bollyood news than of Bhopal.

Print media,
whether managed by corporate world or run on their own juice, are financially
very vulnerable. While private sector ads seem to be running riot these days
yet most of the papers hugely depend on government advertisements. Government
is, therefore, a great beneficent for the promoters of print media. Scarce is a
newspaper that cares little for the government ads. The net result is that a
reader has no way to have his opinion published. Most people would have noticed
that even the column of “letters to the editor” has been scrapped. What has been provided is space for a measly
few words through what they call “feedback”. So, even if on an issue one boils
within with rage or gnashes one’s teeth one cannot communicate it to the people
through opinion pieces or letters to the editor

Guha very
rightly says that the dependence of media on government advertisements is
especially “acute in the regional and sub-regional press. The state and
political parties can and do coerce, suppress and put barriers in the way of
independent reporters and reportage.” Quite logically, therefore, the
guillotine fell on us and we were all gagged, our freedom of expression flying
out of the window.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Plummeting standards of political discourse in the country
can surprisingly be largely attributed to its “Grand Old Party”, the Indian
National Congress. Some years ago, its current president, Sonia Gandhi, called
Narendra Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, “maut ka saudagar” (merchant
of death), hinting at his alleged role in the Gujarat communal riots of 2002.
She, as the head of her supposedly secular party only had in mind the violence
of Hindu “communalists” forgetting that they were reacting to the Godhra
carnage that preceded and provoked it. If innocent Muslims were killed by the
rioting mobs, the killings in the railway coaches were premeditated and had
been preceded by elaborate preparations and were perpetrated on equally
innocent travellers. When Gujarat riots are mentioned the killings in Godhra
are hardly ever mentioned. In my opinion, these two tragic and unsavoury events
should be mentioned in the same breath otherwise it wouldn’t be secular enough.

All that, however, is beside the point. What we came out to
discuss was the plummeting standards of political discourse. Looks like, Sonia
Gandhi threw the first stone, so to say. Now, years later, her son has made a
similar goofy statement abusing the current prime minister in very crude terms.
During one of his political campaigns in Uttar Pradesh he was reported to have
said that Narendra Modi, the current prime minister, was hiding behind the
blood of “jawans” (soldiers who were killed in the Uri attack). He went on to
accuse Modi of indulging in “dalali” (brokerage) of army men’s blood – hardly
anyone knows what that ment.

Apparently he could not, as usual, express properly whatever
he had in mind. Predictably, all hell broke loose and soon thereafter a series
of press briefings had to be conducted by his Party to clarify the matter and
justify whatever utterances he happened to make. Presumably, in order to make
the briefings more effective the Congress President asked Kapil Sibbal, a
senior member and a highly acclaimed lawyer to boot, to meet the press.
Briefings were just to put across what the Vice President of the Party Rahul Gandhi had intended to
convey which he apparently failed to do, giving rise to a barrage of barbs.
Numerous statements were issued on his statements which were generally
construed as insult of the Forces in an effort to politically attack the Prime
Minister. His accusations were somewhat surprising in the background of his
appreciative remarks earlier when he said that the surgical strike was the
first PM-like action of Modi.

Nonetheless, the statements came in for adverse comments by
political parties which condemned it as an effort to insult the “Army’s
valour”. All round denunciation of his remarks came not only from Amit Shah,
current president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, even Arvind Kejrival, no
admirer of Narendra Modi, too criticized it. That the Army’s sacrifices and
bravery was described as “Khoon ki dalali” was severely criticised by the Delhi
chief minister. Also the Nationalist Congress Party president and a former
Congressman, Sharad Pawar, too disapproved of Rahul Gandhi’s remarks about Modi
Government “profiteering” from the blood spilt by the soldiers.

Even the greatest sycophant of Sonia Gandhi and Rashtriya
Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad Yadav strongly criticized Rahul Gandhi’s
remarks. He said Rahul failed to put across his views in a proper manner.
However much Kapil Sibbal may have tried to justify the outburst of Rahul his
pleadings did not convince anybody. He knew it and the Congress Party too knew
it. Rahul had indulged in some shooting of the mouth out of his visceral hatred
for Narendra Modi and that was clear. He hardly has any control over his
thought process and much less on his expression. With his hatred for Modi and
BJP he gets carried away when he occupies a pulpit and wants to hit both of
them hard even if that happens to be uncivil and crude.

Attacking Modi seems to be a pastime with him. Modi,
perhaps, presents a larger than life presence to him in front of which he finds
himself far too diminutive – which, in fact, he seems to be. He is a reluctant
politician and seems to have no mettle for it. His inferiority complex,
regardless of the boost given to him by his mother and her sycophants,
apparently, does not allow him to climb up to the political stature that his
status in his party demands. All said and done, he is unequal to the job that
has been chosen for him by his mother and the party over which she presides.

Ever since Modi
formed the government on his own steam, Rahul has been trying to nibble at him.
With the kind of majority that Modi mustered at the hustings in 2014 he never
had any worries and has consistently ignored Rahul’s jibes. Having no issues,
Rahul started with the bogey of Modi’s suit worth Rs 10 lakhs (Rs. one million)
that was a gift from one of his admirers. Modi wore it perhaps only once when
Obama was in India and then had it auctioned where it fetched Rs. 4 crore (Rs.
forty million). Then he started a campaign to run down Modi’s government
calling it “suit boot ki sarkar” (a government of suited and booted gentlemen)
and went to town telling people that such a government would do nothing for the
poor. In the process, he would claim that he and his party men work only for
the poor whereas this government worked merely for the rich. He clean forgot
his grandmother’s slogan of “garibi hatao” (eliminate poverty) adopted more
than forty years ago which was a fraud played on the people. Poverty continued
to prevail as her government promoted nothing but corruption. Her daughter
in-law much later had to initiate a poverty alleviation programme in 2004
through the newly installed United Progressive Alliance government which
enacted Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

Rahul Gandhi had also been criticizing Modi’s foreign trips
telling the people that while the prime minister goes visiting foreign
countries farmers continue to commit suicide at home. He made it appear as if
the farmers’ suicides could be attributed to the prime minister’s absences
abroad. This was nothing but another way
of running down the prime minister. One does not know whether he found a corner
to hide when the reports in the press indicated that messages were received
promptly after the Uri attack from the heads of most of the governments of the
countries that Modi visited. During his trips abroad he developed personal
relations with the heads of states/governments particularly of the West. No
prime minister earlier was ever able to forge such close personal relationships
with the leaders of the First World as also those of the Third World.

Despite his illustrious lineage Rahul has never been able to
attain the heights of his elders in the family. His grandfather, Feroze Gandhi,
was a remarkable parliamentarian and he had such guts that he could take on
even his own father in-law Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister. He could
do that because of his political acumen, innate ability, tenacity and
integrity. Somehow, Rahul lacks all that and yet he is being made to strut around
in the country’s political firmament as a political leader. His is not
politics; his forte appears to be in slinging mud at those who happen to be in
power.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

As I came back home that afternoon, my wife
excitedly told me as she opened the door that there had been a “surgical
strike” across the LoC (Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir). The TV was on
and I asked her whether there had been any retaliatory nuclear bombings or
missile (tactical or otherwise) attacks. She didn’t know. She had just heard of
the “strike” when I rang the bell. I was expecting the worst.

Surgical strikes meant getting into the enemy
territory and excising the cancerous infestations. However charitable one might
be, such a strike also means breaching the LoC that was sort of the
international border which was a serious matter. The Pakistani terrorists were
being pushed across the LoC but did the Pakistani Army ever breach it? No,
perhaps not always; they only fired across it to spread a cover in the darkness
of night to facilitate the Jaish or Lashkar or Hisbul terrorists’ to infiltrate.
India crossing the LoC has been very rare and if it happened this time it was
very unusual indeed.

The way the Pakistani Defense
Minister was talking during an interview over a Pakistani channel just a day
earlier I thought Delhi, independent India’s capital that was so seven times
over and had melted away in the hoary past, had once again become history. He
must have ordered a “jawabi mooh tor hamla” (a strong jaw-smashing retaliatory
attack). But this did not seem to have
happened till then. No, it had not materialized; at least the news channels
were not talking about it. They did not show any mushroom cloud over Delhi or
for that matter, over Mumbai or any anywhere else in Indian territory.

Even after 72 hours there was no
“jawabi hamla”. In fact, reports published say that the terrorist camps in
Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) had been shifted away from near the LoC after
the army carried out the surgery despite the assurance of the Indian Director
General of Military Operations to his counterpart in Pakistan that there was no
plan for another such strike for the time being. However, while some terrorists
fled away from near the LoC, a fidayeen strike took place near Baramula where
an Indian soldier was killed and two of the unknown numbers of terrorists were
gunned down. Others in the party seemed to have fled away. Though his proxies
continue to be active in the Kashmir Valley, PM Nawaz Shareef, playing the
victim, has been cribbing that a war is being forced on Pakistan.

That India decided to walk across the
LoC was something that was unthinkable. For years we had observed the doctrine
of “strategic restraint”. Of late, it appeared that the ISI proxies could march
across the Line, inflict mayhem and get back with impunity. But we would
stomach it all. Even the transgression in Pathankot did not elicit any
reaction. We seemed to be playing by the rules: inquiring, collecting evidence
and compiling facts that could prove Pakistan’s complicity and hand the
dossiers to Pakistan. But Pakistan, or rather its Deep State, always
procrastinated to respond if not rejecting the reports and evidences handed
over to them. Even the 26/11 dossier handed over years ago has not been acted
upon.

During Kargil conflict, the fourth
attempt by Pakistan to wrest Kashmir away from India, too, our soldiers died
but they were prevented from crossing the LoC. What is more, even the Indian
Air Force when it was brought on to the conflict zone was asked not to cross
the Line of Control. It was a full-scale war and yet there was this “restraint”
in force. Perhaps the government was under compulsion as it was under the US sanctions
imposed after the 1998 Pokharan nuclear test and did not want to attract the
odium of being an aggressor

This time, too, the Uri invaders had expected
the same lukewarm response and had not factored in the anger that had been
provoked as a result of the loss of as many as 19 of our army men in their cowardly
attack. It not only broke the patience of the people as well as that of the Army
and so, despite the threatened use of tactical nuclear weapons or whatever, the
country took a calculated risk and the Army, supported by the strong political
will, lunged into the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir which, in any case, is Indian
territory grabbed by Pakistan, to neutralize the terrorists in their camps.
That it did not hold on to the area says much about the grace with which the
country acts even in the face of immense provocation. One might recall that
after the 1965 War the strategic Haji Peer Pass practically overlooking the Uri
town captured after a hardly fought battle was returned to Pakistan as a sequel
to the Tashkent settlement.

But, despite the Indian Army’s one of
the rare breaches of the LoC the nuclear toys of Pakistan seemed to have
remained mothballed. And why wouldn’t they be so well preserved? Reports have
been circulating that the North Korean atomic tests were, in fact, Pakistani
bombs. Another report, I think of the Guardian, said the talk of use of the
“tactical nuclear” weapons of Pakistan was premature as these were still not
ready. While writing about it in the Guardian the correspondent forthrightly
said that since its creation Pakistan had mastered the art of using bluff and
bluster. The repeated threat by its Defense Minister and Security Advisor were
nothing but hollow threats. After all even if they had them in their arsenal,
their use would have entailed their country’s practical extinction with only
some damage to India, mammoth as it appears and actually is when compared to
their country.

That explained the absence of the mushroom
clouds over India. But Pakistan’s Army is kind of a never-say-die character.
Surely, they will keep trying some trick or the other in pursuit of their
unfinished agenda of inflicting thousand cuts and bleed India dry. One cannot
come across perhaps a more sadistic nation.

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About Me

There would seem to be no point in talking about the position I used to hold. What is more relevant today is that I am retired from the service of government of India where I worked for thirty four years in senior positions ending just below the top of my department. I retired more than twenty years ago. To be fruitfully engaged I took to blogging and writing articles, initially, on local issues but now for years I have been writing on topical and environmental matters. The writings in the local supplement of a national daily gave me some kind of a positive identity in the town which culminated in my being nominated to be a founder member of Bhopal Citizens' Forum, a powerful pressure group. I am , I think, fruitfully engaged and I have no complaints against life.